I saw this post Randal Rauser’s blog, and I purposely stopped before the spoilers section. The series sounded interesting to me, so I decided to listen to it myself, and then revisit Dr. Rauser’s comments. I listened to all of Blue Babies Pink, by the man now known by his married name, “B.T. Harman.”
While the podcast started well, and had its highlights, in the end, it was a pretty big disappointment. I would recommend it for understanding the perspective and plight of Christians who have all or mostly same-sex sexual desires. It’s difficult in a lot of ways that won’t occur to you, if you haven’t gone through it. Empathy and understanding are always good.
I knew going in that I was in for culture-war propaganda in one form or another; our mainstream culture right now is filled to the brim with this sort of material – what I would call “liberationist” narratives. But his story, initially, was engaging, and I wanted to find out what he eventually decided, and what his reasons were. I listened all the way through. Honestly, it became a chore about half-way through. It was perhaps 33% too long, and was sometimes indulgent and overwrought in its writing, even whiny. I realized at the end that this was really a risk-free move on his part, socially speaking – I mean, that’s how he saw it. While he’s burned his bridges in the evangelical community, he has of course been lauded as brave, honest, and generally wonderful by people with what I call a liberationist world-view. Such people think the fundamental problem facing humans is that “the man” (usually society, but any authority figure or institution) keeps us down, by telling us we can’t act on our deepest desires. Thus, we are frustrated, our true selves are bound in chains of these external expectations. The cure to this fundamental problem is to find out what our real, deepest desires are, and to proudly and publicly act on those, thus actualizing our truest, most free, and most authentic selves. Ethically, spiritually, socially, and even in terms of health, liberationism is a recipe for disaster. But it is a reigning, and usually unquestioned ideology in our time. Though it is a profoundly anti-Christian view of the human self and its place in the world, many a Christian too is sucked into liberationist thinking. I mean, God’s a nice guy – wouldn’t he want us to be our true selves, and be able to act on our deepest desires?
Back to this particular podcast, it is clear that this was a long pre-planned move. The podcast was essentially an exercise is personal brand-building, and he has now left his old job, and presumably a lot of his evangelical friendships, and can be found here. Yes, it was real story-telling too, and I appreciated that, but I eventually realized how selective it was.
I do believe that he was a real Christian, and that he was sincere in his endeavor to live a celibate lifestyle. However, he did feel pulled towards the mainstream culture – that too is clear, reading between the lines of his narrative. He still calls himself a follower of Jesus, as of his epilogue episode, but his avoidance of theological thinking in the last parts of his narrative is glaringly obvious. I agree substantially with Rauser’s review.
Some observations:
1. Like many evangelicals, he seems to conflate God and Jesus. He thinks “Jesus” is just God’s proper name. God Almighty just turns out to be this very nice, forgiving and self-sacrificing Jewish man. He’s not someone whose judgment should be feared. Surely he just wants you to be “happy.” On that,
2. Like many in our culture, he thinks of human happiness or flourishing in terms of goods available in this life, particularly “love” – i.e. pairing up with a lover in a sexual, exclusive friendship. In this, his views are opposed to Jesus’s teaching. This is no doubt due in part to pop-theology on which God is just a nice fellow who wants you to be “happy,” i.e. satisfied with your life.
3. He doesn’t believe in the coming Kingdom of God, ruled by Jesus. Rather, he has vague, pop-theological hopes of “going to heaven” and entering somehow into God’s “timeless” existence. He mentions this in passing in one episode.
4. Like many in our culture, he thinks a key to human happiness / flourishing is “love” as defined above. In other words, a human can’t truly flourish and thrive without it. Not Jesus’s view, nor Paul’s, nor any sort of Christian view, no.
1-4 are directly related to weaknesses in standard North American evangelical teaching. Our author is a product of his environment. 1 is a sort of dumb-down of tradition catholic speculations about Trinity and Incarnation. 3 too is arguably a hold-over from Catholic theorizing, in opposition to clear New Testament teaching. 2 and 4 just reflect the unjustified assumptions of many modern cultures. We have not realized that Jesus’s teaching is more plausible, given theism.
5. He never really seems to get past the idea that according to Christian teaching “being gay” – i.e. having a same-sex sexual orientation, with the regular desires that entails, is “bad,” i.e. that one could be blameworthy simply for being that way. This doesn’t make any sense, of course. He’s unclear, it seems, that it is gay sex, not having a same-sex orientation which seems to be forbidden by the New Testament. It’s clear that at the start of his journey he viewed a same-sex orientation as a sort of malfunction, not reflecting God’s intention for humans. This doesn’t sit easily with his final embrace of gay sex. Did he change his mind, holding instead that God makes some people gay, and so it must be his will for them to (sometimes, appropriately) act or their sexual desires? He doesn’t say. He complains about feeling broken, damaged, unwhole – but does he still think that he is, or not? Christians normally expect that disabilities, e.g. blindness, will be healed at the resurrection to eternal life. Does he think that post-resurrection he’d still be beset with same-sex sexual desires, or not? Moreover, how is this coming eternal life relevant to the question of human flourishing, the question of what it takes to be “well off”?
6. Speaking of sex, he tells us basically nothing about his sex life in the whole series. He reveals what it is fashionable to reveal – his loneliness, his hurt feelings, his confusions, his self-loathing, his longing for love. I don’t fault him for keeping the whole thing PG. But surely sex is relevant to this whole matter, as evidence by his since the end of the series entering into a same-sex marriage.
7. Evangelicals are nice. They are, on the whole, people of good will, and they love God and other people. They don’t, most of them “hate gays.” People who aren’t familiar with evangelicals, and who imagine than the “God hates fags” people the media loves to feature are representative of the Evil Christian Right ought to hear his story. As he explains, his parents were great people. His Christian friends were great. When he “came out” to them one by one and two by two, it seems that almost to a man they expressed their love of him and continued support for him. At the same time, they don’t necessarily have very carefully considered views about “homosexuality,” some of them just insisting that “it’s a choice,” which is too simple. Nor does their culture really know what to do with people like Brett.
8. He did enjoy engaging in the explaining-the-Christian-fringe-freakshow-to-amused-godless-progressives genre, in the episodes on his involvement in the Pentecostal revival in Brownsville, FL. This is a fun genre for NPR types and BBC viewers. And I found these bits interesting. My only point is, he knows his main audience here; he knows that he’s leaving the evangelical world for the embrace of the ruling class, and he chose to do this very publicly. This is not particularly brave. It is a low-risk move, given that he wants acceptance by non-Christians in our culture.
9. The poor protagonist, God bless him, struggled with anxiety as much as anything – in the end, anxiety that he’d miss out on “love” as defined above. Based on these presentations, his biggest problem was anxiety.
10. Like a bad evangelical sermon, the series ending is all feelings, no Bible. No discussion of the nature or relevance of OT prohibitions on gay sex. Nor any discussion of the NT, perhaps most relevantly,
Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-11)
Hmmm… what could be going on here? It looks like “sodomy” (gay male sex) is taught to be a sin. In the end, the series lacked intellectual courage and integrity. Our hero simply answers the call of “love” and starts dating men. He gets all tingly. Close curtain.
Why does he no longer think that gay sex is wrong? Or has he indeed changed his mind about that? Does he simply disagree with Paul, or does he hold to some interpretation where gay marriage (or monogamy?) isn’t actually forbidden by Paul? The listener is left hanging. At the end he disavows any desire to get into the trenches of these arguments. But his narrative of course has a point, and it’s much like the philosophy one sees in standard romantic comedies: follow your feelings, find your deepest desires, and love will prevail.
Want to think about this subject as a Christian? This series is not for you.
For a far more thoughtful view about the place of gay people in the present and future Kingdom, check of this episode of Restitutio featuring theologian Dr. Wesley Hill.
